◊ Silmeria

Not to nitpick, but I think you mean Shadowbolt > Incinerate. Just clarifying cause I got at least one warlock buddy who went "Whoa!" at me when he read this (if only he had read the entire thing...)

 

Bogeywoman

Your imp has close enough to infinite mana, when Spirit and Int buffed, that the few extra mana you get from Imp Life Tap when you do find yourself having to use it are pretty inconsequential. For raiding builds, try 2/2 Soul Siphon for emergency healing and grinding help, 2/2 Imp Drain Soul for the threat reduction, and, if not hit capped, dump spare points into Suppression until you are. Even though it's affliction only, if you have dark pact, you're a heavy affliction build.

 

Anduryondon

Is there any Reason why a shaman cant drop windfury AND grace of air or another air totem with cycling his totems every 10 seconds, besides the wcds?

 

• Nite_Moogle

Mana issues. 700 mana per 10 seconds is not a trivial amount. There is absolutely no way that this is more useful than spending mana on damage or heals during that amount of time.

 

Anduryondon

But basically, if you have enough mana for the given amount of time it would be the best choice, am i right?

 

PapaShlapa

A little note about the heroism/GCD issue..

http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=494412
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=494411
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=494409

I'm 100% positive I'm unable to chaincast scorches without getting spell not ready errors.

http://siggen.xembler.org.nyud.net:8...statsO1ukn.jpg

 

◊ Rob

Wouldn't you say something like "A good rule of thumb is that if DPS Warrior * 2 plus non-Mutilate Rogues is greater than or equal to 3, Windfury will provide conclusively better DPS regardless of the rest of the group's composition."? (Could also be re-written as "greater than 2", if you like.) I think this is agreed on as true by most of the reputable theorycrafters and it also is more specific (for example, I sometimes drop GoA when I'm running Karazhan with a feral tank/undergeared Warriors in the group to push off more crushes: I'm well aware it's not the best DPS, but it's still "better".)
Well, there are better options than the Gladiator weapons available in BT (e.g. Rising Tide); also, if we're trying to eliminate extra posts or just having the option to linking people to the sticky I'd maybe split up these points, just so that people see it when skimming quickly:
- Windfury Weapon (the self enchant) has a 3 second cooldown incurred each time it procs, regardless of which hand procs; it has a scaling proc rate from 16% to 36% on each weapon strike (((I don't remember what the exact conclusion was on this, but seem to remember something like this from Disquette))). Even though this cooldown can no longer be bypassed by downranking the offhand, max rank Windfury Weapon remains the best-DPS enchant for use on both hands, primarily because it scales with Enhancement gear while other enchants do not.
- Slow weapons are preferable to fast weapons for use in both hands due to the Windfury cooldown. Currently, all weapons which have a flurried and hasted speed below 1.5 seconds (i.e. those with a listed speed of less than 2.0) are inferior to even high-level greens for DPS. The best easily-obtainable options are the 2.6 speed Gladiator weapons in each hand.

 

◊ Shalas

No.

 

◊ Rob

So then you think a group with a Warrior, a combat rogue, a shaman, and 2 druids would be better to drop GoA than WF? That disagrees with the vast majority of sentiment found in this thread. To clarify, the original post by Nite_Moogle suggests that 2x warriors plus rogues must be GREATER than 3, I'm saying it should be greater than or EQUAL to 3.

 

◊ Shaker

I find it funny that the thread that was supposed to stop these sort of debates just spawned another one.

Sorry Moogle.

 

• Nite_Moogle

I need to clarify my original post, Rob is correct in that I should have said greater than two, or greater than or equal to three but I am trying to avoid getting bogged down too much in details so I may leave the latter part off. The line is blurry enough depending on the level of gear and specifics of what the warrior and rogues are using that I am going to say it's just better for the warrior because of execute. I have a few more edits to do via PM and I will re-check the Bloodlust thing again tonight (I have access to a mage).

 

slant

Debate is always a good thing; as theories are examined and discarded or confirmed, Nite can always edit the original post.

As I understand it, assuming karazhan gear or greater, the only rogue spec that doesn't count in the "if warriors*2 + rogues >= paladins, shamans, hunters, feral druids then WF totem" is envenom. And that's not a PvE spec anyway.

 

TheOnly

A paladin dpsing would be another "warrior" in that calculation. WF is almost 20% dps for them (175 or so). Yeah, there are probably only 10 such high end raiding dps paladins in existence, so its not a key point, but they heavily favor WF as well.

 

• Kruthal

"Close enough to infinite mana", what does that mean exactly? Some numbers please. Last time I checked this, full buffs placed the little guy at close to 400 mana/5 with full raid buffs (iMotW, DS, BoK, BoW, AI doesn't really matter past the first pact). Which puts Dark Pact quite a bit short of being enough mana-recovery.

 

• Nite_Moogle

Updated with some clarifications and additional notes. Thanks to the people contributing to this thread.

 

◊ Anias

Moogle, my thread on haste is:

[Mechanic Primer] - Haste - How it works, and what that means.


I'll be updating it as new data arrives if you'd like to link the title of the haste section to it.

 

Bibdy

Yeah, my bad.

There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.

 

tedv

It would be nice to have a section on "What gems should I use?" since that topic comes up frequently. I know that for Tanking it's "+12 stam, always". And for Shadow Priests it's "+9 damage, unless it has a +damage set bonus. And even then +9 is often better".

 

wind

400mana/5 means you can dark pact for 1.6 k mana every 20 seconds. Considering the average casting sequence of Ua/corr/immo/coa/siphon/sb spam/refresh lasts about 18 seconds, it means that you can dark pact once every rotation.

As for the assumption that every raiding affliction warlock should have Imp. Lifetap, I strongly disagree. If you're deep affliction, you rely on dark pact, NOT on lifetap to get mana back. Lifetapping means you require healing/lose gcds using pots. As far as I'm concerned, lifetap just wastes gcd's and time that can be spent recasting dots, and I believe affliction locks only use it when they absolutely need mana that dark pacting can't provide at that particular moment. So putting 2 talent points in a talent used rarely is a bit wasteful, at least for dark pacting warlocks.

 

• Nite_Moogle

This tends to get a little muddy for some classes (especially when Flurry starts getting involved), since then you're in to the area of stat prioritizing and budget equivalence which isn't really a quick reference sort of thing. The question "what gem should I use" is really just asking "what stats are best for my class" which is often a very difficult question to answer. +9 damage isn't even always the right answer, since you may not be hit capped without gemming for it, similarly +sta is only 'right' if you're at 490 defense.

 

darkInertia

- Non-instant spells will reset your melee swing timer upon their completion. This includes spells that normally have a cast time that are made instant by other means (such as Nature's Swiftness).

Unless the base game functionality changed, I thought that paladins and shamans are the only classes whose autoattack isn't reset when casting instant cast spells. Druids, mages, locks, and priests (and perhaps hunter- mend pet, changing aura?) all have their weapon swing timer reset after casting an instant spell.

I'll try to get on the test server to see if NS by a shaman counts the spell as truly instant, or if the above statement still holds true.

Anyways, I'm not saying that your statement is incorrect; maybe you should just add the pally/shaman part to the list as well?

 

The Grog

My understanding of feral dps implies two important things.

Cap your hit rating, since a feral's special and autoattack hit cap is the same.

Agility is better than Str until you can regularly complete 5 CP before your current rip times out on a rip/mangle/shred-to-5 dps rotation. Not having to remangle or rip with less than 5 CP will outweigh the slightly larger gains from Str, but only for Boss/Raid dps.

Additionally, your Staff weapon skill does NOT affect dps in feral forms. 'Feral Weapon Skill' appear to be always capped by level.

 

tedv

While that's true, such a section seems equivalent to comments like these:

It seems like the purpose of this thread is to be an excellent summary of non-trivial questions that have a generally agreed upon answer. If you have to say "12 stam gems are the best once you have 490 defense", that's still an extremely helpful (and true) statement, even if it's only true 99% of the time.

I'd also suggest that recommending a best gem or set of gems for a given class, at least when one exists, is much simpler than giving a full stat evaluation. Is claiming "9 spell damage is almost always the best gem" any different from saying "+hit provides the best benefit per item budget if you aren't capped"? And that's much simpler than saying "1 spell damage = 3 m/5 = 4 int = 5 stam". "Spell damage is better given the budget" is a generally accepted statement while the specific value tradeoffs are not.

 

Harwin

I am under the impression that I could spam wing clip and still melee normally, so it wouldn't be resetting my swing timer.